Posts about Media_on_Media

I have to finish a Guardian column about Howard Stern and I’m taping a moment on Newhour for this evening about shield laws so I’m overmediaed but will return, whether you like it or not, as soon as I can today. Later.

Well, it was an interesting day on cable Sunday. On Reliable Sources, we saw the right going after the right over Harriet Miers and we saw the left going after the paper of the left on Judy Miller. Echo chamber? What echo chamber? Echo chamber? What echo chamber?

I apparently pissed off a few of my liberal goombas when I said that the Democrats have some answering to do for their cynical acceptance of Miers and here’s what I said in response to them on their blogs:

We all know that Miers is not qualified and for Democrats to say we’ll take her anyway is essentially a cynical and even irresponsible act. If he nominated Madonna, would you say, well, OK, it could be worse? Or should we demand better of Bush. I hope we still stand for quality. And I don’t care whom that irritates.

The real issue here is that Bush put up a crony and a fool and tried to make fools of all of us and we ignore that stand at our own peril.

Meanwhile, Hinderaker was going after the right for going after the right’s leader and his candidate. We should have just sat back and watched them eat their young.

Bob Garfield writes another magnum opus for Ad Age. The last was on his chaos scenario for advertising. This is on the open-source revolution. Great lead:

Hear that?

In the distance? It’s a crowd forming — a crowd of what you used to call your “audience.” They’re still an audience, but they aren’t necessarily listening to you. They’re listening to each other talk about you. And they’re using your products, your brand names, your iconography, your slogans, your trademarks, your designs, your goodwill, all of it as if it belonged to them — which, in a way, it all does, because, after all, haven’t you spent decades, and trillions, to convince them of just that?

Congratulations. It worked. The Great Consumer Society believes deeply that it has a proprietary stake in you. And like stakeholders everywhere, they are letting their voices be heard.

Why? Because the information society is reversing flow. What began as an experiment among a few software nerds has, thanks to the Internet, expanded into other disciplines, notably media and law. But it won’t stop there. Advertising. Branding. Distribution. Consumer research. Product development. Manufacturing. They will all be turned upside down as the despotism of the executive suite gives way to the will, and wisdom, of the masses in a new commercial and cultural epoch, namely: The Open Source Revolution.

Here’s the Ad Age link, though that won’t work without blood tests and security clearances. Don’t tell anybody, but a blogger put the piece up here. Open-source revolution, indeed.

I’m on a panel at the national confab of public-radio program directors in St. Louis today with the esteemed David Weinberger. More later. For an interview with NPR’s online czar, see — or rather, hear — PaidContent.

Vaughn Ververs, the new blogger at CBS, replied to some points I raised on objectivity, opinions, personal biases, and independence in my interview with him, and then quoted many of you, dear commenters, with responses in turn. Good on him.

The emphasis here is not to express our personal views. If that makes this less a “blog” than some would expect, then so be it. It is worth remembering that this conversation was started based on what Jeff Jarvis and his readers considered important, not necessarily what we considered important. It is exactly this sort of dialogue we will seek to facilitate.

As a group purporting to provide a level of transparency at CBS News, our biases (such as they are) are a legitimate topic of discussion. To that end, the biographies posted here, especially the long version of my own [link here], are intended to demonstrate what some of those biases might be. As with most things, anyone is free to make assumptions based on the information available but we urge caution in doing so. You know what happens when you assume …

The blog gets a bit wordy, as that snippet does at the end. (Imagine me saying that: a case of the pot calling the kettle metal, eh?).

He also addressed my snark about being accompanied by a handler:

Jarvis, and some readers, also made much of the fact that I showed up for our talk accompanied by a “flak” from the CBS News PR office. I confess that the arrangement was slightly awkward for me as well in the sense that it hurt efforts to demonstrate independence from the news division.

A reporter asked me to critique Public Eye but I said it’s just too soon. What blog finds its voice and raison d’etre in a day and a half? I’ll give it more time.

But I will complain that they don’t have an RSS feed, though other stuff at CBS does. Friendly, neighborly tip: Better get one before Winer comes calling!

A second personal announcement: I am now a regular, every-other-week columnist for Media Guardian.

I’m delighted and honored to be there because I’ve long admired the Guardian’s media section and because I think the Guardian is the best-written newspaper in the world (in English, at least). And note that I’m there not thanks to my resume but thanks to my blog. In fact, they say they want me to write for print on themes I’ve explored here — how shall we say this? — for screen.

Today’s column reiterates and polishes up some of what I’ve written about news media and Katrina. The Reader’s Digest version, just the lead and the kicker:

In less than a day, Hurricane Katrina rendered worthless the printing presses and broadcast towers that made big media big. And that will change news forever….

But journalism’s rediscovered courage and newly discovered fallibility are, I will contend, less profound changes than the one brought on by the flooding of presses and the toppling of towers. For at that moment, news was freed from the shackles of media. Now he who controls distribution no longer controls news. And news is no longer shaped by the pipe that carries it. That is what Katrina did to the news.

Rex Hammock, a magazine publisher and fellow blogger at Rexblog.com, wrote that the Times-Picayune and nola.com deserve a Pulitzer for their news blogs. I second that. It doesn’t matter whether the work came rolling off a press or a blog: it is journalism of the highest calibre and greatest service. The Pulitzer committee would serve journalism well by separating the content from the container, the medium from the message, and recognising great reporting wherever and however and from whomever it comes, with or without a press.